On a day when Democrats had every reason to be energized, and in a county where they rarely lose an election, voters stayed away from the polls by the thousands.
In Buchanan County, turnout was just 53 percent Tuesday — the lowest of any city or county in the state.
And among those who did vote, support for Barack Obama was so lukewarm in this coal-mining corner of Southwest Virginia that the Democratic candidate for president lost to a Republican for the first time since 1972, when Richard Nixon trounced George McGovern.
John McCain’s 5-point win in Buchanan County underscored the challenge Obama faced throughout Appalachia. While McCain lost Virginia, he ran up a 19-point lead in its southwestern region, his largest margin in the state’s 11 congressional districts.
Many residents of Appalachia seemed troubled by the stark differences — racial, cultural and by some accounts religious — between themselves and Obama.
“I hate to say this, but I believe a lot of Democrats just couldn’t vote for him,” said Vern Presley, a Grundy lawyer who is chairman of the county Democratic committee.
Presley was shocked by the outcome in his county. And puzzled, he said, after seeing the local Democratic base turn out in force for rallies and other events leading up to the election.
“There is no other reason that I can point to other than to call it the Bradley effect, ” Presley said, referring to the theory that voters unwilling to vote for a black candidate will insist otherwise to pollsters and others.
The phenomenon is named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a black candidate who led in the polls but lost the race for California governor in 1982.
As Obama became the first black man elected president of the United States on Tuesday, it appears that many people in Buchanan County decided to sit this one out.
Of the county’s 16,525 voters, slightly more than half — 53 percent — turned out, according to the state board of elections. That compares with a statewide rate of 72 percent.
Turnout in Buchanan County was 59 percent in 2004 and 61 percent in 2000.
As far back as midsummer, some political insiders in the coalfields were hearing grumbling from voters who said they were inclined to stay home Nov. 4.
“Around here, the term is ‘winter my vote, ‘ ” said Jerry Gray, a former commonwealth’s attorney in Dickenson County. “If they say, ‘I’m going to winter my vote, ‘ that’s the same thing as saying, ‘I’m not going to vote.’ ”
Region’s Democrats were out-hustled by the GOP
Like Buchanan County, its neighbor to the east, Dickenson is one of the most reliably Democratic counties in the region. Four years ago, when John Kerry couldn’t break 40 percent in the 9th Congressional District, Buchanan and Dickenson counties were the only islands of blue in a sea of red that stretched all the way to Roanoke.
Far more often than not, “Dickenson goes Democratic, ” said Kay Edwards, vice chairwoman of the county’s Democratic committee. On Tuesday it went for McCain, albeit by just 46 votes.
Why was it different this time?
“I think a lot of it is prejudice,” Edwards said. The last census found just 58 black residents, or 0.35 percent of the county’s total population.
But some say the divide between Appalachia and Obama is more cultural than racial, especially when residents of the deeply religious region hear false but persistent rumors that he’s a Muslim.
While working the polls Tuesday, Edwards overheard a voter call Obama a terrorist. “There has been some of that spread around here, and once it gets spread, people believe it,” she said.
In Buchanan County, Presley said, “I heard people of faith say they really believed he may be the Antichrist, and if you were a Christian you couldn’t go in there and vote for him.”
To be sure, there were other reasons for residents of far Southwest Virginia to be wary of Obama. Republicans sought to portray him as an enemy of coal, long the lifeblood of the local economy, and the National Rifle Association warned residents that he would take away their rifles and shotguns.
As Election Day approached in Buchanan County, Democrats found themselves in the unusual position of being out-hustled by the opposition.
“I think they [Republicans] worked harder than they normally do, ” said Jay Rife, a county resident and former head of the Democratic committee. “They turned their people out, and we didn’t. It’s as simple as that.”
Obama gave S.W. Virginia large amount of face time
It’s not that Obama was expected to win Virginia’s Appalachian vote, which lies almost entirely in the 9th District.
The 9th — which begins just west of Martinsville and Roanoke and extends north to Covington and west to Lee County — has supported Republican presidential candidates since 1980, with the exception of Bill Clinton.
But the district also has an independent streak, along with enough scattered Democratic strongholds to occasionally make it a political wild card.
The goal was for Obama to simply do well enough in the 9th to preserve the margins of victory he built up in the state’s more populous areas, said U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, who represents the district.
By claiming 40 percent of the 9th’s vote, Obama performed slightly better than Kerry did four years ago, Boucher noted. And he did well enough to become the first Democrat to win Virginia since 1964, beating McCain overall by a 52-47 margin.
A key reason for Obama’s decent showing in the 9th was his decision to make campaign stops in Bristol and Lebanon, along with a trip to Roanoke, just across the district line, Boucher said.
That’s a lot of face time for a region long starved for attention from presidential candidates.
According to Boucher’s research, the last time a presidential candidate visited the 9th District was in 1900, when Democratic contender William Jennings Bryon traveled to what was then the booming coal town of Pocahontas in Tazewell County.
“I personally believe that he’ll be the most Southwest Virginia-friendly president in American history, ” Boucher said of Obama. “He knows more about the 9th District than any presidential candidate in our lifetime.”
Former Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat who was elected to the U.S. Senate on Tuesday with strong support in Southwest Virginia, agreed that Obama gained from campaigning in the region.
Though the bulk of Obama’s support was in Northern Virginia, Warner brushed aside a question about whether the results in the presidential race reveal a stark regional divide.
“We do a disservice if we try to continue to kind of separate Northern Virginia from the rest of the state, ” he said. “We are one commonwealth.”
Staff writer Michael Sluss and senior editor Dwayne Yancey contributed to this report.